Ameen Saeed al-Sheikh, detainee no. 151362, says he is stripped naked at Abu Ghraib and threatened with rape. After being stripped, one of the guards “told me he would rape me,” he later recounts in an interview with the Washington Post. “He drew a picture of a woman to my back and makes me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks.” He adds: “They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen.”
[Washington Post, 5/21/2004]

Three Abu Ghraib detainees naked and cuffed together. [Source: Public domain]Three detainees at Abu Ghraib, suspected of having raped a male teenage detainee, are set aside for punishment and stripped by MPs. Pfc. Lynndie England describes the scene, apparently talking about Spc. Charles Graner and Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II: “They started to handcuff the two rapist[s] together in odd positions/ways. Once the two were handcuffed together, the third guy was brought over and handcuffed between the other two. Then they were laying on the floor handcuffed together, so all the other prisoners could see them. Cpl. Graner and Staff Sgt. Frederick then asked me to start taking pictures with the camera.” [International Committee of the Red Cross, 2/24/2004 ]

Lynndie England drags a detainee known as Gus by a leash around the neck. Megan Ambuhl looks on. [Source: Public domain]At the Abu Ghraib prison, three detainees who were photographed naked the day before (see October 24, 2003), are again striped naked, handcuffed together, placed on the ground, and forced to lie on top of each other and simulate sex acts while they are being photographed. This treatment happens, according to a CID (Criminal Investigation Division) investigation, “on several occasions over several days.” Those present or participating in the abuse are the MPs Spc. Charles Graner, Ivan Frederick, Pfc. Lynndie England, and Spc. Sabrina Harman, all of the 372nd MP Company. Also directly involved are three military intelligence soldiers from the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion. Two of the military intelligence soldiers arrive at the Hard Site when the abuse is already taking place. One appears to have known beforehand that something was going to happen. [Washington Post, 5/22/2004] When they arrive, one MP is yelling through a megaphone at the naked detainees, who are forced to crawl on their stomachs and are handcuffed together. Gen. George Fay will later conclude in his report (see August 25, 2004) that this incident “was most likely orchestrated by MP personnel.” On the other hand, England says, “MI [Military Intelligence] Soldiers instructed them [MPs] to rough them up.” One of the most clearly humiliating photographs taken at Abu Ghraib is also dated October 25. It depicts an unidentified naked detainee, nicknamed “Gus,” with a leash around his neck and with the end held by Pfc. England. Spc. Megan Ambuhl is also present, watching. According to England, Cpl. Graner put on the leash and then asked her to pose for the photograph. [US Department of Defense, 8/23/2004 ]

Huda al-Azzawi and her siblings are detained at Abu Ghraib. Numbered 156283, she is to spend a total of 197 days in the prison, [Le Monde (Paris), 10/12/2004] of which 156 days will be in solitary confinement at the Hard Site in one of the upstairs cells. [Guardian, 9/20/2004] She will be interrogated thirty times. [Le Monde (Paris), 10/12/2004] Her cell at the Hard Site measures two square meters, and initially it has no bed and just a bucket for a loo. For the first three weeks she is forbidden to talk. Guards give her a Koran. With a stolen pen, she records her experiences in its margins. In the first weeks at Abu Ghraib, Al-Azzawi witnesses many instances of torture. “The guards used wild dogs. I saw one of the guards allow his dog to bite a 14-year-old boy on the leg. The boy’s name was Adil. Other guards frequently beat the men. I could see the blood running from their noses. They would also take them for compulsory cold showers even though it was January and February. From the very beginning, it was mental and psychological war.”
[Guardian, 9/20/2004] Possibly the worst she sees, are incidents of rape. “I saw men that had water bottles forced up their butt by soldiers.” To the question whether women also ran the risk of rape, she says, “the women were relatively sheltered.” But it may also be more difficult to learn of women being raped. “You won’t find a single one who will testify to having been raped. A rape, for a man, is the supreme humiliation, but for a woman, it is a death sentence by her own family.”
[Le Monde (Paris), 10/12/2004]

“There was never enough food and one day,” Huda al-Azzawi, detained at Abu Ghraib (see January 4, 2004), recalls, “I came across an old woman who had collapsed from hunger. The Americans were always eating lots of hot food. I found some in a packet in a bin and gave it to her. They caught me and threw me in a one-meter-square punishment cell. They then poured cold water on me for four hours.”
[Guardian, 9/20/2004]

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh dismisses photos taken of prisoners at Abu Ghraib over the course of several broadcasts. The excerpts are collected by Newsweek, researchers from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and the progressive media watchdog site Media Matters. On May 3, he tells his listeners, “You know, if you look at—if you really look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna or Britney Spears do onstage—maybe I’m, yeah—and get an NEA [National Education Association] grant for something like this” (see October 2003, October 17-22, 2003, October 24, 2003, Evening October 25, 2003, November 4, 2003, November 4-December 2, 2003, and Between 4:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. November 4, 2003, among others). On May 4, he says: “You know, those [US soldiers in Iraq] are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time. These people—you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of needing to blow some steam off? … It is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.” On May 5, he says: “I think a lot of the American culture is being feminized. I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.” On May 6: he says, “The thing, though, that continually amazes—here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts or whatever.… I mean, this is something that you can see onstage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex and the City.” In that same broadcast, he praises the torturers by saying: “And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it’s pretty thoughtful.… Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured.… Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.” And on May 11, he says, “If you take these pictures and bring them back and have them taken in an American city and put on an American Web site, they might win an award from the pornography industry.” [Media Matters, 5/6/2004; Newsweek, 5/13/2004; Boehlert, 2006, pp. 118; Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 160]

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in a speech to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), says that there is proof that Iraqi prisoners, including women and children, were raped and sodomized by US guards while in custody at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. Hersh, who, as evidenced by a video recording of the speech, is struggling with what to say and what not to say, tells the assemblage: “Debating about it, ummm.… Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib.… The women were passing messages out saying, ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened,’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.” Hersh continues: “It’s impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai [a US military atrocity during the Vietnam War] I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers, and so we’re dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will.” In an earlier speech, Hersh noted the photos and videos of “horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.” [Salon, 7/15/2004] Other stories from Abu Ghraib document the rape and sexual assault of prisoners (see October 7, 2003, October 24, 2003, and January 4, 2004).

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